Happy New Year!

July 1 is quite possibly one of the most significant days of the year for some people.  First of all, it's my mother-in-law's birthday (Happy birthday again, MJ!).  Second, it was the first birthday that my grandmother spent in heaven - she would have been 101 here on earth.  And finally, it's the first day of a new fiscal year for almost all government entities.  I know this sounds horrendously boring, but both my personal and professional life have been revolving around July 1, 2011.  Work actually gets....not easier.....let's just say less complicated for me after July 1.  I won't bore you with the details.  From a personal standpoint, Emma's allowable therapy hours under Medicaid start over, which means.....VITALSTIM THERAPY IS BACK!

Beginning tomorrow, Thursday, at 3:00, Emma will start her VitalStim speech therapy to try to retrain her throat muscles to swallow correctly.  7 weeks (one week break for the beach) from now, she'll have another swallow study to see if it helped.  In addition to the speech therapy, we're going to try doubling the amount of OT and PT that Emma gets during the week.  She currently receives 45 minutes of simultaneous OT and PT, but now we're going to do 45 minutes each of back-to-back independent OT and PT twice a week.  She will get to have therapy with her new boyfriend, Chris, her all-time favorite therapist, once a week.  Last Friday, Chris stopped by briefly to say hi to Emma at therapy.  She pushed away from the therapist who was holding her and made an army-crawl bee line to Chris.  Let's just hope he can get some good work out of her!

Emma held out until 10:00 Monday night at our church's Fourth of July celebration because there was no way she was going to sleep with all those people everywhere.  Of course, the moment her head hit the car seat, she was out.  Literally, out like a light in the parking lot.  The last couple of days she has been a little booger for my mom, fighting sleep and just being nosy.  Oh, and she wore herself out swimming in Mama Jane and Granddaddy's pool on Sunday.  I anticipate that either tomorrow or Friday she will collapse and pull a Rip Van Winkle on us.

An entry from last year:

July 5, 2010